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It is kinda depressing to know that a 5000 dollar card can't do proper finishing. Even worse is that I have two of them. Also, the guys from Filmlight (makers of Baselight) told me about many of their clients feeling the same way about the rocket.

I guess it does what it does and thats fast turn around low quality transcoding (but still high enough quality for most people) and for Finishing work you're better off having a render farm type system so spend the money on some more CPU's then on the Rocket.

That is certainly where I'm heading, I'd rather have a faster CPU (X5680) then get the Rocket as it doesn't do what I need it to do for my Finishing work.

So does Resolve, Scratch and Filmlight all use the Rocket for interactive work then switch over to the CPU for final rendering/transcoding? Or are people just using the Rocket transcoding as the best they can get without going to CPU processing for optimum quality?

Rocket is sharp enough demosaic to not need the OLPF compensation in RC-X, indeed, I don't often recommend it's use - it's something best done at the end of the processing chain. Similarly with the NR, which is just chroma BTW, which is quite nice in RC-X (Mike Seymour seems to love it) but again, not a necessary thing as most shots don't need it, and if they do need NR, the NR tools in the finishing software are usually up to the job.

ROCKET is suited well to being used for the quick production of offline files due to it's realtime ability to transcode RAW into a variety of filetypes from RCX.

High quality finishing work may be done with the online files after editorial when there is more time for the CPU to do its work though whatever finishing app is being used, since the ROCKET will not provide OLPF compensation and/or chroma NR.

Eric, I haven't used it for finishing yet, I have been using it for dailies mostly every day.

That said, I recently had a long chat with people who have tried to use it for finishing, in an environment where every lil bit counts, and they decided that the quality of the debayer isn't exactly the same and that the CPU debayer does look better. They reckon that red might have to skimp out on somethings of the algorithm to get realtime debayering.

The Rocket demosaic isn't necessarily better or worse than the software one - they're different. Rocket is sharper naturally, so no need for the OLPF compensation control, but also, a tad noisier. It's a tradeoff, and again, it's designed for hardware realtime, whereas the software one can be more flexible via it's software nature.